Computer Technology Blog: April 2006

No Drive Letter for USB or Firewire Drive

Admin April 19, 2006 Add Comment

No Drive Letter for USB or Fire wire Drive

When you connect your USB or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) storage device (hard disk or USB drive) to your computer, Windows will pop up a notification messages that showing USB Mass Storage Device, and then Disk Drive was found. However, you just simply can’t access the drive, and there is no automatic “Autoplay” prompt too, if you enable it.

The USB or Firewire storage drive doesn’t show up (not available and not accessible) in Windows Explorer or My Computer window, although it has been detected, even if the drive has been used properly before in the same computer. In the Device Manager, everything including USB Hub and USB Root Hub, shows working properly. In some cases, it also shows a USB or Firewire storage drive attached and the drive it is working, and the USB or Firewire drive will appear in Disk Management of Computer Management in Microsoft Management Console (MMC) too.

Another symptom to the problem is when you insert the USB or Firewire drive, a “Safely Remove Hardware” icon will appear in Windows notification area (system tray). When you double-click on the icon, the drive appears in the list, but when you display the details of the disk (by double-click on the drive or select the drive then click on Stop), there is no drive letter attached to the drive.

The cause for this problem is that all drive letters are already assigned to other devices or mapped network drives, making no additional drive letters available. Or it may be caused by the drive letter that previously assigned to the drive has been taken up by a mapped network drive or other storage device.

Resolution is to disconnect mapped network drives or other storage devices, freeing up a drive letter or the previously assigned letter to assign to the additional storage device. If you can see the drive in MMC Disk Management, right click on it, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths, then click on Change. Select a drive letter that is unused and click OK. The USB or IEEE 1394 drive can now be accessible

Searching for Application in FreeBSD’s Ports Collection

Admin April 08, 2006 Add Comment

Jingo

Searching for Application in FreeBSD’s Ports Collection

The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for users and administrators to install applications. The number of applications in FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection is growing with the time, which now exceeding ten thousands ports.

All Ports Collection is stored at /usr/ports directory, according to their respective category-based directory. If you know the name of the port that you need, but don’t know which category it’s located, whereis command will be helpful:

whereis file_name

For example,

# whereis phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin: /usr/ports/databases/phpMyAdmin

The whereis command returns the exact location of the port specified.

FreeBSD Ports Collection also has built-in search function. In /usr/ports directory (you need to be in /usr/ports directory to use the search mechanism), run make search name=program-name or make search key=keyword to search for a particular port.

For example,

# make search name=”phpMyAdmin”

# make search key=”phpMyAdmin”

Note: Without the ” and ” will work too.

Both will return details of the ports matched, if any. One of the result if “Path”, which will tell you where is the port located.

The keyword search is a more in-depth searching that searches port names, comments, descriptions and dependencies. It can be used to find ports which relate to a particular subject if you do not know the name of the program you are looking for.

Alternatively, FreeBSD also maintains an up-to-date searchable list of all the available applications, arranged by category. You can search for your application by name and browse all applications that are within the category.

FreshPorts also allowed users to search for FreeBSD’s ports by keywords. FreshPorts tracks and lists the change made to the ports tree, and allows users to watch one or more ports, and can email you when your selected port has been updated.